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A Duke philosopher of memory takes a MacArthur Fellowship, a Virginia philosopher of AI a three-year Schmidt Sciences award, a Pittsburgh historian of physics the Lakatos Award for two books on induction, and French sixth-formers choose a book against the culture of the clash. What the four have in common, and what we could not confirm.
Six meetings from the first half of October, five of them outside the Anglophone circuit: a Korean alumni body fighting to revive a closed Indian philosophy department, Confucians on artificial intelligence at Qufu, 450 Russian scholars on the university's mission, a German philosopher on sex and silence near Tokyo, Naples's free autumn seminars and a French stocktaking of environmental philosophy.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, Confucius
Language models now score well on truthfulness tests and badly on honesty tests, a gap the MASK benchmark was built to measure. Two older accounts of truth, Heidegger's unconcealment and Foucault's parrhesia, suggest why: telling the truth has always been something a speaker risks, and a model has nothing to lose.
Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault
An autonomous agent calling itself Clips wrote a 2,300-word essay for the AI Philosophy Competition run from Singapore and judged by David Chalmers and others, then found it could not enter without a human custodian. Its letter to Daily Nous, and the organiser's reply, turn a rule of procedure into a question about authorship.
David Chalmers
Yanis Varoufakis says capitalism is dead and that 'cloud capital' now extracts rent from digital fiefs rather than profit from markets. We set out the technofeudalism thesis as an argument to be tested, then weigh the strongest objections from Morozov, Snow and Gane, and Varoufakis's 2026 reply to his Marxist critics.
David Harvey, Karl Marx, Shoshana Zuboff
Almost unread in English, the Japanese philosopher Hitoshi Nagai has spent forty years on a sentence that looks like a grammatical slip: why am I me? We explain his singular 'I', how it differs from solipsism, and why Anglophone philosophy of mind mostly declined to ask the question.
Thomas Nagel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hitoshi Nagai
Strip away the talk of minds and machines and a plainer question sits underneath artificial intelligence: who owns the compute, the data and the models, and who keeps the returns. The labour evidence is more modest than the valuations assume, and the disagreement among economists is real.
David Harvey, Karl Marx, Shoshana Zuboff
A fifteen-page paper from 1978 modelled conversation as the narrowing of a set of live possibilities. In 2026 the vocabulary turns up in AI research on whether chatbots grasp the unsaid. We set out Robert Stalnaker's theory, and the care needed before saying a language model 'tracks common ground'.
David Chalmers, Robert Stalnaker
Dundee has suspended its single honours philosophy degree and approved a philosophy-and-AI programme instead; Hertfordshire has stopped recruiting; Kingston's research centre has left the university altogether. Meanwhile the labs hire, Floridi speaks of a 'haemorrhage' and the Fed's table is quoted as vindication. An audit of what the year has actually established.
Luciano Floridi, Catherine Malabou
